JOY, ELEC­TRI­FIED

Is it a car’s power? Is it the way it steers and han­dles? Is it the way it sounds? Some drivers will say it’s all of the above. BMW would like to add an­other char­ac­ter­is­tic to this list: The abil­ity to go the dis­tance.

And that’s ex­actly what you get with BMW’s iPerformance mod­els. The BMW iPerformance lineup in Sin­ga­pore cur­rently con­sists of the 225xe iPerformance, 330e iPerformance, 530e iPerformance, and 740Le xDrive iPerformance.

Th­ese are all very dif­fer­ent cars. One is an MPV and the oth­ers are sedans. But what they all share in com­mon is the fact that they are all plug-in petrol-elec­tric hy­brids (PHEVs).

A hy­brid is a car that has both an elec­tric driv­e­train and an in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gine. At low speeds, the elec­tric mo­tor can drive the car, but when more power is needed, the reg­u­lar mo­tor is started to move things along. The main dif­fer­ence be­tween a PHEV and a “reg­u­lar” hy­brid is that you can lit­er­ally plug the for­mer into a charg­ing out­let to recharge its bat­ter­ies, whereas the lat­ter re­lies mainly on its in­ter­nal com­bus­tion mo­tor to charge the bat­ter­ies.

The elec­tric driv­e­train in a PHEV is also more pow­er­ful than a hy­brid’s, en­abling it to go faster and travel fur­ther on elec­tric power alone com­pared to a nor­mal hy­brid. BMW’s iPerformance mod­els aren’t just or­di­nary PHEVs, though. That’s be­cause they’re en­gi­neered to be sporty and eco-friendly. The BMW 530e iPerformance, for in­stance, has a tur­bocharged 2-litre petrol en­gine that pro­duces 184hp and 290Nm. This en­gine is linked to an elec­tric mo­tor that’s pow­ered by a 9.2kWh lithium-ion bat­tery.

To­gether, both driv­e­trains de­liver 252hp and 420Nm, fig­ures that let the 530e iPerformance clock a zero to 100km/h time of 6.2 sec­onds.

With its bat­ter­ies fully charged, the BMW 530e iPerformance is ca­pa­ble of trav­el­ling up to 50km on elec­tric power alone. That dis­tance is what the aver­age motorist in Sin­ga­pore cov­ers in a day.

Util­is­ing both driv­e­trains, the BMW 530e iPerformance can con­sume as lit­tle as 1.9 litres of petrol per 100km, a fig­ure un­heard of for an ex­ec­u­tive sedan. That’s what you get with the BMW iPerformance range of PHEVs. Driv­ing plea­sure means in­tel­li­gent and ath­letic per­for­mance that goes the dis­tance.